Small Talk

xii . preface
people doing it so well. I made it my goal to figure out
how to keep a conversation going for longer than five
minutes.
One of my first experiments with small talk was a
life-changing success. I went to happy hour at a local
nightspot with a girlfriend. A man across the room began
making eye contact with me. All night we kept exchanging
glances, never speaking. My girlfriend prodded
me. “Debra,” she said, “just go over there and say something
to him.”
I replied, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have anything to
say. Besides, if he wanted to meet me, he’d have come
over by now.”
But my girlfriend would not relent. She was so
adamant that her challenge finally inspired me to go over
and introduce myself to him. As I walked across the
room, my heart pounded so loudly, I could hardly hear
myself say hello to the man I now know as Rex. He
pulled out a chair and said he was delighted to meet me.
From that inauspicious beginning we began to date each
other. A friendship developed, and I learned a lot about
Rex. The most important thing I came to learn, though,
was why Rex hadn’t approached me first at the happy
hour. I was certain that his reluctance was an unspoken